Category Archives: Books


The Exegesis
(part 1 of [End of Time])

Annette said, “I suppose Louis Manfreti will represent the Skitz clan again this year. I always enjoy him; he has such interesting things to tell, the visions he sees of primordial things. Beasts from the earth and the sky, monsters that battle under the ground…” She sucked on a piece of hard candy thoughtfully. “Do you think the visions that Skitzes see are real, Gabe?”

“No,” Baines said, truthfully.

“Why do they ponder and talk about them all the time, then? They’re real to them, anyhow.”

“Mysticism,” Baines said scornfully.

(tired now, will revise tomorrow)

The structure of the Exegesis is a bit of a mess and, from what I know, done posthumously (the division in folders) without any discernible logical sense. So there’s no straightforward way to go in. Since I don’t have any better alternative I’ll stick with the published book, that supposedly rearranges the folders in chronological order. So my current plan is to follow the published sequence and integrate the original material where there are parts that are cut.

It starts with folder 4, at some point during 1974, and my source also starts from the same point. So I’ll go with the book.

This project is supposed to be ongoing without any planned regular frequency. I expect it to continue very, very slowly, but hopefully without huge delays. It’s just one side activity. Even if I only end up reading 1% of the whole thing, that’s fine. I only want to avoid being stuck at some point for a long time.

At the beginning I expect to spend a lot of time commenting details. As things become established and more redundant I’ll probably read a lot more and write a lot less. But for now it will be maximalist commentary.

So here we go.

—–
Ubik takes the stage and without any sort of premise Dick plunges in the deep end. We’re already into metaphysics and abstract interpretation from the first line.

He says (in Ubik) time stops but “changes” are produced. We’ll get back to this apparent contradiction. The idea is that once time, as a force, becomes weaker and stops, something happens: “the bare bones, so to speak, of the world, our world, are revealed.” And: “The press of time on everything, having been abolished, reveals many elements underlying our phenomena.”

Since I’ve read further than this, I already know that what Dick is doing here isn’t giving a metaphysical/fictional context to Ubik, but equating what happened in Ubik to his own mystical experience, that is at the core of the whole Exegesis. So everything he affirms about Ubik generally applies to what he experienced. Lets say it is being “retconned.” Ubik is used as a translator of that experience, transforming a “feeling” into rational knowledge, an understanding. That’s our context here.

One idea here is of a layer of reality. Something happens, and the curtain drops, you get a glimpse of a beyond. But Dick is sure this beyond isn’t another curtain, or at least not yet. There’s a certain philosophical foundationalism, the idea of seeing a more foundational reality. Not just another one, but one that is truer.

If time stops, this is what takes place, these changes.

Emphasis mine. Time stops, but change happens. This appears as a contradiction, since usually time is required for change to appear. Dick is only highlighting this.

Not frozen-ness, but revelation.

If we imagine the illusion of reality as a movie, then the time stopping is like a projector, the medium that builds the illusion. This still requires to step outside, otherwise you still wouldn’t notice (as Dick confirms later).

In the introduction to the other post, if you look at the top of that first image, you can see Dick presenting an idea where consciousness exists in a sort of multiverse, where it is plunged at a great speed through different lives. Memories are only built through cues, as if they are inferences. So it’s as if it is time that makes it possible to build a world as we know it. The moment time stops it’s like all the paintings (meaning) we hanged on that framework fall apart. The “bare bones”.

We can then extrapolate through what he says that “time” is a positive force. He says other things related to entropy I can’t quite get. Things cool, forms regress. How? In what way? Action, obviously related to time, is tied to “a form of heat.” Of course it isn’t possible if time stops.

He continues describing the “Logos” and the “Holy Spirit”. The Logos is essentially the fabric of the world (the world beyond the world). The wider foundation. So the Logos is also outside time, since time is only one force within reality. The Holy Spirit is a kind of force too, so it is contained, somewhat internal to the Logos. The Holy Spirit is the “last station” of time. The omega point in the direction of time, the final point of that trajectory. In Dick’s scheme, then, the Holy Spirit stands at the far right, intending that the arrow of time intuitively goes from left to right, along its conventional progress.

Due to its nature also as a kind of force, the Holy Spirit doesn’t quite wait there at the end, but “overcomes the time field and flows back against it.” So it moves in a trajectory opposite to that of time. It’s coming our way. “It is the anti-time.”

Then he makes a few distinctions. The Logos comes right from the outside (above), the Holy Spirit is instead within, also within time and “is moving: retrograde.” The “real universe” is eternity. Logically since we already established fundamental reality comes in the form of the Logos, and the Logos is placed outside time itself. Outside time is eternity. The Holy Spirit, then, behaves like tachyons, as if we are in Watchmen. In the comics it is what allowed Dr. Manhattan experience time in a weird way. Dick subscribes to this possibility of tachyons.

Up to this point everything seems to follow, somewhat. But then he says a form of equilibrium is achieved because the Logos operates in three vectors: from behind, from above, and from ahead. This also seems to follow, the force from behind is time (causal), from left to right, the force coming from ahead is the Holy Spirit, as described, and the force from above is the Logos. Well yes, it’s a bit abstract. Why above and not below? Why a direction? The Logos is supposed to be the “Atman, everywhere.” It is pervasive, the fabric itself.

*NOW* equilibrium is being lost because as time weakens there’s an increasing “retrograde teleology.” The Holy Spirit, I guess. It is inversely causal. But why the norm should be “equilibrium” if the normality is the flowing of time? It should mean that in general the force of time is at least stronger than the retrograde force of the Holy Spirit. Or time would be completely stalling, not moving forward not backwards. Here I began to think there was something missing in all this description, a kind of secret sauce. Dick is precisely describing metaphysics but it looks like hand waving if there isn’t a description of what these forces do, why they behave they way they do. Actors set up on the stage, but not causal. This is doing this, but how, why?

We get a handy example. He says it’s like some space travel from a planet to another. So you can make a distinction between three phases. The first is when you are under the force of the gravity of the planet of origin, a second phase when the gravity pull between the two is equal, and a final phase when you move into the gravitational force of the destination planet. Seen subjectively from the spaceship that is doing this journey.

Through this, the Holy Spirit, as the destination (and force with its own purpose), “corrects” and “completes.” I cannot avoid interpreting this other than Kabbalistic terms. These are spiritual terms. But it’s not simple to conform these with a more technical example (nothing has been described as incomplete or incorrect).

He then explains that when he wrote Ubik he built a world with just one difference from ours, a world without the forward moving force of time. But in the first line he actually wrote that “time ceased”, not that it was absent. In any case he points this out to make a distinction. When he wrote Ubik he simply came up with this concept of a fictional world, “now” he is instead persuaded that time has ACTUALLY “begun to weaken.” If before he thought of time as subjective perception, now he externalizes it, and makes the weakening of time an universal event. And since this is now “true”, and not a fictional conceit, then it can be experienced.

I have indeed had that experience, or a measure thereof.

In another letter, Dick writes (the part scribbled by hand):

What scares me most, Claudia, is that I can often recall the future.

As a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, the theme of Ubik eventually came to be. As if Ubik itself was informed from the future.

Flipping forward a page, taken from a letter to someone else, Dick explains he really bought into this concept of tachyons “flying in a reverse time direction.” Therefore “carrying information from the future into our present.”

“In the light of these developments, we can no longer exclude on a priori grounds the theoretical possibility of precognitive phenomena.” so forth (Harper’s, July 1974).

…He’s quoting a magazine. Bad science has always been bad science.

So, jumping back to where we left, Dick expects that “material (information) from the future leaking or bleeding back to us.” I really like this materialistic slant. Information is somewhat solid (even metaphysically), that’s actually good. And then he also describes another effect that is very Dick-ian, I like this too: “abrupt lurches back on our part to recent prior time periods, like a needle on a record being anti-skated back to a prior groove.”

The latter we would not be consciously aware of.

And that’s the part Dick does best, and conforms to my dear Blind Brain Theory. Perception is a trick, it needs information on the absence of information to know that something is missing. If we don’t have memories, then we don’t perceive change. We could wake up every day in a completely different reality and not notice anything weird. Our inferences are contextual, as he properly defined in that excerpt I mentioned above.

My doubts above were due to the fact that stepping from one boundary of reality (like a curtain) to the next requires perception. We aren’t in the objective perspective of the Logos “from above.” We are subjectively caged. So not only Dick hypothesizes that time might stop, but that somehow subjective consciousness (experience) moves on independently from time (not bound by it). As a sort of Wile E. Coyote that continues to run even if the ground is not there anymore. Isn’t time a necessary vehicle for perception? Somehow Dick believes they are on independent tracks. The absence of time doesn’t freeze perception as one would intuitively believe (see above “not frozen-ness”, it only warps it.

Yet he’s not completely outside what I’m saying, as right here he describes how he also conceives perception in the exact same way: those other “lurches through time” are not perceived, simply because we have no knowledge of them.

Highlighting that the other event, of material from the future showing up, would be instead visible. Because that material “is not by us but to us.” It’s existing information we cannot account for, but that is there. A scientific proof (in the pure sense of its existence outside subjectivity).

If you cannot experience the time skips, instead, you cannot prove them either. They simply don’t exist, that’s all. Metaphysically (but also materialistically), one is generally bound to the layer of reality he belongs to. You cannot simply shuffle the soul back and forth. Unless you use the magical sauce.

He concludes this section by explaining that the event he experienced wasn’t an “intellectual inference”, it wasn’t specifically rational. It was a perception, a sort of feeling that he tried to pinpoint and rationalize after the fact. He labeled it. He “felt” it was both “alive” and “holy.” But in the way of sensations, not concepts. As if he’s trying to logically rebuild a platonic ideal abstraction into a logical recreation, as faithfully as possible. He also didn’t experience that phenomenon as appearing to him, but being it. Being the Logos. He was subjectively perceiving the Logos as the Logos would perceive itself if it had subjectivity.

More accurately, not the Logos itself, but the Holy Spirit, since he specifies it came from the future. Dick argues this, ultimately settling on the fact that the Logos and the Holy Spirit are semantic distinctions. And yet he highlights that he’s certain it came from the future. That part not being semantic, but faithful to the feeling itself. I can only wonder “how”, but that’s what Dick says.

I like how he concludes, in a sort of self-observing loop:

From within me, as part of me, it looked out and saw itself.

He both “saw and became” (the philosophical sense of being). So both in and out. Both subject and object. System and environment.

I’ll add myself: also, he either was informed from the future when writing Ubik, too, or he was able to win the Magical Belief Lottery. How probable can be that a fictional concept you imagine not only becomes somewhat plausible, but also manifests right TO YOU. Of course this is also logically possible, within a certain metaphysical frame. As long Dick was precisely chosen. That information from the future just couldn’t be framed as a spontaneous natural phenomenon… precisely happening to you. Unless you also add some form of retrocausal teleology, that we see is also part of all this.

The bottom line is that Dick describes this as a self-sustaining, let’s say self sufficient, explanation. I instead think it needs a lot of other stuff if it wants to hold up, logically. Too many missing pieces. Too vague.

I’ll conclude tying up the gap to the letter that follow and that I already mentioned, when he explains about the tachyons and the possibility of “precognitive phenomena.”

He continues saying that for several months he’s been experimenting. Because of something else he read while researching “A Scanner Darkly.” Something about the possibility that the brain can “transduce external fields” under certain special conditions. One of which was “vitamins in megadosages.”

…Of course Dick being the fool that he is put this right into practice.

I began attempting, on the basis of what I knew, to bring on both the hemispheres of my own brain using the recipe for megadoses of the water soluble vitamins

Well, thankfully they were only water soluble ones.

Water IN-soluble vitamins are those that get absorbed and then stored in the body, so taking large doses with a certain frequency can become a real health risk, exactly because they get accumulated and become toxic. It’s a very bad idea.

On the other hand water soluble ones, as the term says, simply end up being pissed away when the body absorbs too much, before they can do damage.

I guess Dick ended up going to the bathroom more frequently, with this ill informed “experiment.”

An Exegesis eisegesis (ongoing)

I had this project (of sort) for a very long time so I simply decided that I needed to start or it would be one of those things endlessly delayed.

One good reason for NOT doing it is that my knowledge of Philip K. Dick is rather poor, and the Exegesis is filled with interpretations of Dick’s own body of work. It’s a “meta” self-analysis of his life and everything he wrote. So the Exegesis should come AFTER you read and understood everything else, and are ready for Dick own further insight. It’s the last station. But reading all of his production, or even a meaningful portion, would be already a giant project that would be almost without end by itself (with my current realistic pacing, of course). So the Exegesis was just this long term goal that only kept moving further and further away.

The choice was simply to go straight to the deep end. A long time ago I read a number of short stories, some of which I still remember quite well. I also read Ubik but remember almost nothing about it. More recently I read “The Man in the High Castle”, and I thought it was especially good. It had a somewhat “literary” flavor, not pulpy at all, it might have been maybe a weird bias because I read it on a pristine copy of the Library of America collection.

My attention when reading the book was all on the language. I felt as if there was this other layer, separate from the story, where the lines of text had a more abstract and general meaning. Not quite there. By the end of the book it was like I was on a very private journey, as if I wasn’t sure that what I was reading was really what was expected. Now I just don’t know how accurate my experience of this book was. I was somewhat distracted, looking at other things, highlighting parts of the book and taking them out of context, to run off with concepts, away from the story and characters.

I probably understood very little of that book, in a “traditional” way.

This will inform my experience of the Exegesis. I’ve got a plan, I know what to do and how. You can take the Exegesis like the convoluted speculations of someone caught in a loop of mental illness, and that’s probably the most accurate conclusion. I don’t expect to find any sort of “revelation” in a transcendental sense, actually I’m absolutely certain of this. I’m not chasing after mystical influences. I’m not a believer and there’s zero chances of me becoming one, unless I end up losing my mind as well. I guess.

But at the same time I’m going to take the Exegesis SERIOUSLY. Because I take everything seriously. I’m not here to judge. I’m not here to “diagnose” Dick, I’m not a doctor, I know almost nothing of mental illness, so I’m not going to look for an “explanation” for what he was feeling and writing. I will treat this as a sort of mythology, and I’ll follow James Hillman’s idea of “sticking with the image” (speaking of dreams and interpretations). Taken straight form the wikipedia:

the moment you’ve defined the snake, interpreted it, you’ve lost the snake, you’ve stopped it and the person leaves the hour with a concept about my repressed sexuality or my cold black passions … and you’ve lost the snake. The task of analysis is to keep the snake there, the black snake…see, the black snake’s no longer necessary the moment it’s been interpreted, and you don’t need your dreams any more because they’ve been interpreted.

What I’ll try to do with the Exegesis is… dig deeper. I want to look for deeper patterns. The deep end of the madness, the potential. The symbols, the myths. It should be a journey, not a judgement. (and yet I’ll also have to understand, how I understand)

At the same time, how can I pretend of being able to dig deeper, with what knowledge? From what privileged position? Well, that’s why this is a deliberate “eisegesis”, meaning that, as I was doing for The Man in the High Castle, this is a personal journey where I will dig in the direction I choose. Eisegesis means I’ll read into the Exegesis whatever I want to find, whatever I think I see, but without any pretense of being faithful to Dick himself, without an objective goal or insight.

Then again, I CAN read the Exegesis. Because I’m not floatsam. My own philosophical and scientific concepts of the world, and metaphysics in general, are now very well grounded, very well structured. I come to this project with a well organized mind, with a solid framework that generally helps me a lot. A kind of reliable compass that I can use to orient myself in the most alien of terrains. And I am rational and sometimes cynical, so on one side I’m certainly not putting myself on a pedestal, but I won’t do this with Dick either.

I’m not coming to the Exegesis thinking it will be an extraordinary and revelatory work of a mad genius. But I expect it being food for the mind. The life of the mind.

I was forgetting the important part:
I’ve bought, years ago now, the hardcover edition of the published portion of the Exegesis but my project doesn’t stop there. I’ve also scoured the internet for all the material I could find, including the original scans and a good total amount of stuff that isn’t part of the published book. I made a rough count of all I got and it’s a grand total of 6500 pages. According to various estimates the original whole thing should be 8000+ pages, so it certainly isn’t complete. I’ve read estimates all over the place, like the published book being only 1/10 of the total. This doesn’t seem true. A page scribbled by Dick usually just takes half a page or so, of the published book. I know the published total is about 360k words. The book itself goes from page 1 to 900, so maybe it’s closer to 1/5 or 1/6 of the total. And then I have the rest of the material. So, maybe, closer to 3/4 of the total.

The quality of the material available is all over the place. It goes from typed pages:

To somewhat readable handwriting:

To badly scanned and sketchy mess like this (and not the worst example):

Some of these have already been transcribed, but a lot of the material done overlaps with the book. I’m going to use everything, the book, the online transcriptions, and then even doing my best to extricate meaning from the handwritten pages, with variable levels of success, I guess. But I’ll try.

Trying too hard

I received today the hardback of Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James. It came out just a few days ago. It’s exactly 620 pages with some large line spacing, and it also looks like a very slim book just because they’ve used very high quality but thin paper. Otherwise it’s a 220k words, and so around 550 pages on a standard format, including a few maps drawn by the writer himself, or at least through some softer because they don’t look hand-drawn. It’s the first in a trilogy titled “The Dark Star”, but this is only written on Amazon because there’s no mention at all on the physical book itself.

My prediction is that is going to win the next Hugo. Or the next after this one since I think this year are only eligible the books that came out in 2018, but I might be wrong.

Jemisin won best novel the last three years. We all know the political mess around the Hugo. What has happened in the last three years can objectively be described as an anomaly. Maybe not so much because the novel prize went to a black woman, but because a fantasy book won, three times, year after year, and in the form of a series.

Now, I do believe that Jemisin happened in the right place at the right time, because I think it’s not too outrageous to say that the book might not have won otherwise (the Hugo isn’t too keen on epic fantasy), and even more unlikely three times in a row. But again I have nothing against that. I bought the book (and the previous trilogy by the same author) long before it got popular because I read excellent reviews and very interesting ideas. It sounded absolutely amazing. It’s still part of a big to-read pile ready for my next life so I cannot give first-hand opinions, but I’m certain it’s an great book that deserves the praise it got, and I see this whole scenario as a general case of “killing two birds with one stone”: sending a political message by promoting and celebrating diversity while giving the spotlight to an excellent book that deserve it.

In the end these “prizes” don’t really reward the “best” book, because that’s impossible. They are simply marketing tools. And at least we end up with a very good service if to be promoted is the diversity itself. Because the diversity, or change, in culture will also reflect in the writing. It broadens the view.

But if it was the perfect opportunity for Jemisin, this time it looks like the perfect storm. Marlon James is a black, gay man (from what I’ve read), who won the Booker prize a few years ago, so coming from the high tower of literature, raining down on the ignoble and lowborn fantasy genre, waiting for a new messiah to bring the light. The reviews are filled with superlatives, so I don’t know how this could go wrong. We’ve got all the ingredients once again, they seem even better aligned than with Jemisin.

Is there any problem with that? None at all. The book seems indeed excellent, I’m absolutely optimistic, and being set in Africa it kind of drags along that quality of diversity. It might seem as an artificial recipe (take Game of Throne and set it… in Africa), but in a way or another it forces a novelty, and the author seems to have totally embraced it and without holding back any punches. If anything I expect a snowball effect. (well, Amazon reviews right now don’t look great, but the motives they use don’t seem very convincing anyway, it seems they don’t like that the book is mean and brutal)

But the reason of this post is another, and it’s about the marketing that surrounds the book that TRIES SO DAMN HARD that it can feel quite ridiculous and even irritating. First because you can see how this was “air dropped” from those high walls of literature and those who have been co-optioned. What do I mean? Who are those genre writers that these day celebrate the genre by the virtue of being outside of it? Well, Neil Gaiman and China Mieville, for example, and they are of course those who were carefully chosen to provide cover blurbs for this book, projecting it right into that very dandy and exclusive club that is LITERARY sci-fi & fantasy. “Open the gates! He’s with us!” (but of course he won that pass on his own, by winning the Man Booker prize, Mieville and Gaiman appeared BECAUSE of that, chaperoning him in)

So we have a typical parade of now high-brow “celebrities” to help elevating this book to the ranks of literature, and okay, but what’s even more ridiculous is how they all speak about it.

Let’s see. By the way, this escalation is exactly all I saw when I started getting curious about the book. These weren’t handpicked, they all appeared right away in quick succession.


src: The New Yorker

IT BEGINS!

We have African Game of Thrones. Alright. This is also mostly acceptable since it’s Marlon James himself to explain his intent. The article is noteworthy for other reasons, but lets not get sidetracked…

Yay! Gaiman namedrops Tolkien! It’s super-effective!

(well, well, to be entirely correct he isn’t comparing this book to Tolkien, but to a Tolkien-like specific feature, that of a well realized and solid worldbuilding.)

That’s a classic, but do you think it stops there?


src: The New York Time

Umm… WTF?!

This is the New York Times, now it’s literary equivalent of the Marvel Universe, just one step away from Middle-Earth.

So, what’s next?


src: The Washington Post

Beowulf, REALLY?!

…What is wrong with people?

Well, alright, this one is the same that goes with Marvel Comics.

Of course it wasn’t enough, better add some more names. I cannot even blame that title, it’s designed to be outrageous for a reason.

But finally we come full circle back to Gaiman, because on the back of the actual book there’s a more complete blurb, and of course he didn’t stop at namedropping the obligatory Tolkien…

I couldn’t find a picture of the backcover and I cannot take it myself right now, but the quote is all over the place.

“Black Leopard, Red Wolf is the kind of novel I never realized I was missing until I read it. A dangerous, hallucinatory, ancient Africa, which becomes a fantasy world as well-realized as anything Tolkien made, with language as powerful as Angela Carter‘s. It’s as deep and crafty as Gene Wolfe, bloodier than Robert E. Howard, and all Marlon James. It’s something very new that feels old, in the best way. I cannot wait for the next installment.”
—Neil Gaiman

That’s what the original quote read like. A list of names. (and “the kind of novel I never realized I was missing” has such a rhetorical, phoney feel that it only does a disservice to the book)

This is the list of what the book has been associated with:

– Tolkien
– Game of Thrones
– Marvel Universe
– Beowulf
– Hieronymus Bosch
– Garcia Marquez
– Angela Carter
– Gene Wolfe
– Robert E. Howard

I assume this isn’t remotely a complete list. This is what I’ve seen immediately right on the Amazon page of the book. I’m sure that if I made a more careful search that list would grow longer and longer.

Comparisons are fine. I look for them, I use them. They have their use and they represent an effective heuristic to gather information quickly about something like a book. They are a tool to quickly orient your curiosity. The problem here is that this list of names doesn’t really help.

It’s as if I claimed: this book is the perfect mix of Joyce’s Ulysses and Fifty Shades of Gray, with the intrigue of Dan Brown and the wit of Pynchon.

Wtf does that mean? How it can even be useful? How do you go from Robert E. Howard to Gene Wolfe and then the Marvel Universe?!

Taxonomy goes to the slaughterhouse.

Quotes

The first is Erikson, the last Bakker. They aren’t together because I think they are really related, but I read them the same day.

“Traditions die. And those who hold fast to them, cursing and filled with hate as their precious ways of living are torn from their hands, they dwell in a world of dreams where nothing changes.”

“Tradition was not a thing to be worshipped. Tradition was the last bastion of fools. Did the fisherfolk see their final fate? Did they comprehend their doom?

And oh, how they all grew fat and lazy in the weeks that followed, their bellies soft and bulging. There are fish in the lake, the elders said. There have always been fish in the lake. There always will be fish in the lake.

The elders stopped telling their stories. They sat silent, their bellies hollowing out, the bones of their wizened faces growing sharp and jutting. They spat out useless teeth. They bled at their fingertips, and made foul stench over the shit-pits. They grew ever weaker, and then slept, rushing into the distant dreams of the old days, from which they never returned.

The layering of memories built tradition’s high walls, until the place made by those walls became a prison.”

“There were two pasts; he understood that now. There was the past that men remembered, and there was the past that determined, and rarely if ever were they the same. All men stood in thrall of the latter.”

Malazan Uncertainty

I plan to focus more on being concise than complete but I’m still spread across too many things to make any decent use of this place, going forward.

I was about to start saying “a few weeks ago”, but now I notice the news came out in the middle of October. Time is ACCelerating.

I wanted to write down a few scattered and confused thoughts about the announce of the delay of the final book in the Kharkanas Trilogy, in favor of the planned trilogy that instead comes after the main Malazan sequence. Right now I’m 50 pages into the second book (Fall of Light) and slowly acclimatizing myself again to that story. Forge of Darkness remains for me the very best by far in the whole overall cycle, and every time I pick up the book to check something and re-read a page here and there I reconfirm that idea.

I was of course disappointed by this choice, though not surprised at all reading that this prequel trilogy sold badly. But I’ll put this discussion to the side, there are many reasons why the prequel trilogy didn’t get a lot of attention. It’s 2018 (now), I’m still at the beginning of Fall of Light, and I even have the last four books still to read in the main series, plus pretty much all of Esslemont. So it’s not like I need a book right now. A Walk in Shadow, the final book in this prequel trilogy, is not “canceled”, just delayed. Maybe to be written after this other trilogy is finished, or maybe to be written just right after the first new book. It’s up to Erikson.

My worry isn’t about an urge to have the book as soon as possible, my worry is that time affects and transforms things. It isn’t about having the book out in five years from now instead of next year, it’s that the delay will make it a different book. Maybe it’s already even too late for A Walk in Shadow, I would have hoped Erikson already deep into it in order to carry exactly the style and momentum and sharp, almost visionary focus that I admired in Forge of Darkness. My belief is that this time will transform the book, necessarily. Will Erikson be able to dive back in and make as if no time went by? Will it be the same book as if it was written now? So I worry that now this trilogy, that is the best Malazan especially for that style, tone and mythical vision, that specific mindset, is doomed to become somewhat “lopsided”, even in the case it will be completed later on. As with what I wrote about Sanderson, the risk isn’t about not completing the thing, but about being in that relevant mind-space (and one has to be honest, Sanderson is better, and has significant help, at keeping track of all his stuff).

I certainly won’t complain. I still hold Fall of Light, and Malazan has already delivered way, way more than one might ask. Even if the final book will never be finished, Forge of Darkness by itself makes a complete and satisfying statement.

But I also worry about this new “toblakai” trilogy. I’ve seen people in the forums being relatively excited and my opinion is pretty much irrelevant since I’ve yet to read the remaining books and I have no idea in what kind of place Karsa ends up, or what are the premises this trilogy is built on. I’m very skeptical about it, but I was also very skeptical about the prequel trilogy as well, and that turned out amazing.

I just wonder how it might work, and if it really could be more successful commercially. The prequel trilogy was a distillation of the very best Erikson, but “best” doesn’t mean “popular”. The idea of a sequel is always more alluring than a prequel, as it’s still a continuation of a well known story compared to the curiosity about flashing out details of a remote past. A prequel trilogy requires more dedicated commitment to go diving into those details. A sequel instead is perceived more as a mandatory read, for those who went that far. So there’s the potential for it to see better sales overall… But.

I’m uncertain about it being “Karsa’s trilogy”. I enjoy the character a lot, I enjoyed the beginning of House of Chains and I enjoyed the parts in The Bonehunters. I’m just not sure how far you can stretch that character and how you can make it the backbone of the whole thing. I do think Karsa works best in small doses, same as Icarium. Those are characters that bounce the ball back in a specific way. The backbone that truly sustained Malazan, I think, is about the Bridgeburners and the Bonehunters. That diversity. Everything else creates the tapestry, gives scope. But it works because it stays grounded, and what grounds it are the soldiers.

The beginning of House of Chains worked because it was a rediscovery of everything. It had layers upon layers of revelation and deceit (wheels within wheels within wheels). That arc was interesting for many reasons and Karsa grew as a character in that compressed sequence that tied back with book 2 brilliantly. But in a certain way these characters have a tendency to evolve when under the looking glass, to then fall back into their natural role. That’s fine. As I said I still liked Karsa a lot in The Bonehunters, but from my point of view he has become a more static character simply because he had to preserve his function. That’s a risk. You have these characters that are well done but fall in a certain “type”, built to embody a certain function in the fabric of the novel, so, when you have these large, sprawling stories, these characters work as cogs in a larger machine, in order to explore certain aspects of that story. The result is that they work as long they maintain that function, that role and that type, and the consequence is that they have to remain relatively static, or give the illusion of movement, or moving only to still fall back in a similar place. I think the same happened to Karsa. You can see the whole dramatic trajectory, and that’s stays meaningful, but in order to function Karsa ends up not so far from where he started: it’s the same war writ larger. So I wonder: is it enough to carry a sequel? Doesn’t emphasis risk being twisted into parody? Karsa and Icarium are strongly typified characters that function in a certain way and that are quite hard to “ground”. I just wonder if this can work in a series built all around that.

It is a problematic sequel because of all that came before. The main series was built on a pre-existing background, this time everything has to be built as if new. It’s a huge unknown, bigger than the prequel trilogy itself. Ideally a sequel demands the stakes to be raised, could Malazan even sustain that? Or will Erikson be satisfied writing a simpler side-story with a smaller scope that will serve as an epilogue? It might work, or might not. My preference would always be for daring and experimenting more, rather than being conservative, but I think even Erikson himself is persuaded than he can’t top the main series, and so, even commercially, the best choice might be to write something relatively more accessible to give that epilogue that some readers might enjoy. I don’t know. But wouldn’t that choice strip away the qualities that define and set apart Malazan from everything else?

I’m very glad I’m not the one making these choices.

The politics of Warhammer 40k

Epic is who epic does.

I don’t think I’ve stressed enough the point I tried to make in my previous post about Sanderson and his foolishness.

Imagine being 30 years old, and deciding what you’re going to write when you’ll be 60. This is the thing. Epic isn’t the wordcount of the project, epic is the implausibility of the commitment. And acceptance of such commitment. It’s the work required to build an impossible human artifact. A dolmen of impossibility. A monolith. Or an “edifice”, like that other book telling the story of a guy who decides to build a church for no apparent reason. It’s all about seeing past and through what’s possible and sensible. A mission that has no sense, but yet you’re compelled to go through. A writer who isolates himself from the external world to build this artifact.

Another crazy project, but of a totally different typology, is “Horus Heresy”. A literary crossover that tells the story of a pivotal event in the setting of Warhammer 40k, the civil war caused by Horus (and so the titular heresy) versus the God/Emperor.

It’s somewhat like a comics crossover, where an editor has to do the ungrateful and impossible job of coordinating a bunch of writers so that everything makes sense and to build some overall bigger tapestry of events. But what’s surprising is that this endeavor has gone on now for ELEVEN YEARS. A crossover that spans more than a decade. The first book in this saga came out in 2006. We are now at 46 books already out, another out this December, a more planned. They say the end is now in sight, and the overall cycle should be done within 55 or so books.

55 books are a lot, and it’s just one story in the 40k mythos. In the meantime, for example, Black Library released another series of 12 books, already completed, telling another story and set after Horus Heresy itself. It’s called The Beast Arises.

Even Horus Heresy burst itself out of its main cycle. There are also 18 prequels planned (but these are also shorter), and they are actually interesting in the economy of the story, because every book focuses on one “Primarch”. There are 18 Primarchs (or 20, 2 are mysterious or whatever) and they are relevant because when the civil war starts they split in two factions of 9. So knowing the Primarchs before entering the war might give a certain perspective on the whole conflict. It gives the war its broader context, as a kind of convergence.

The average Horus Heresy novel is of course much smaller than Sanderson’s doorstoppers (and written by different writers specializing in their own sub-story-trajectory within the bigger event, and with a significant variance in the quality of writing) but on average we have novels that stabilize around 100k. Some are 80k words, some reach up to 120k or so. In a standard format that’s around 250 pages each book. It’s not much by itself, but now you have to multiply that for those 47 books of original material. And that means that by the time the series is over we’re looking at a grand total of more than 5 million words. It’s quite insane by itself.

And if 50+ books, plus 20 prequels aren’t enough, another publisher is ALSO contributing to the Horus Heresy mythology through pure lore-books + miniature battles, already 7 volumes out, 350 pages each in a big format and looking amazing.

This was all to give some context to the reason why this blog post exists. While looking onto all this stuff I spotted on ASOIAF forums some interesting comments about the significance of Warhammer 40k, under the surface:

Honestly, I think the Warhammer universe is underestimated for its world-building but I got started in roleplaying games before I became a major fan of fantasy so I have a higher tolerance for game-isms than most perhaps. I also think my literary tastes owe a great deal to Warhammer because it’s the system that gave us the word “grimdark” and all the wonderful descriptions it makes.

One thing I’d like to note, though is Horus didn’t ruin the Imperium. The Imperium was an authoritarian militantly atheist totalitarian violent dictatorship ruled by a master race of genetically engineered Psyker warriors. They’re a bunch of scumbags who destroyed innocent cultures, eradicated all Xenos they encountered (the Interax shows coexistence was possible with some), and conquered all humans who resisted the rule of Earth. Horus’ rebellion is karmic, IMHO, because it made sure the Emperor of Mankind didn’t get away with his mammoth amount of crimes.

Then again, I’ve never really been a big fan of Leto II God-Emperors.

Warhammer 40K is a fun setting really for getting into the nuts and bolts of fascism using a fantasy lens. It’s on the borderline between pure and entertainment and art but I think of it as every bit as useful as Marvel Comics X-men for talking about a sensitive subject in ways which the reader might be predisposed to have an opinion on that blinds them to undertones. For instance, with the X-men the issue of prejudice.

W40K, for me, is useful as a discussion of how reasonable people might come to believe militarism and xenophobia are justified by showing the comic extremes necessary to “justify” that kind of attitude in setting. By, essentially, making the ultimate grimdark setting, you expose just how hollow a lot of the justifications for unlimited militarism and absolute prejudice are.

Even then, the books do a good job of showing the justification of the Imperium is often hollow. Gaunt’s Ghosts are cannon fodder despite the fact they’re the most elite, talented, and intelligent group of scouts in the Sabbat Crusade. They’re used wastefully and all of their hopes are destroyed in the meat grinder of its corrupt leadership. Ciaphas Cain hates himself for being a coward and a fraud but he’s in a society which does not revere common sense or preserving the lives of your troops. “Cowardice” in the Imperium is courage to any sensible army.

The Imperium is better than the alternative, which is extinction, but if the better is being a bunch of Theocratic Space Nazi Feudalists (a trifecta of everything working class Brits hate) then how much better is it really?

It’s why, cartoony as it is, I consider W40K to be art.

Like the X-men.

And, a bunch of links that I used to quickly get a grasp of the overall mythos without completely lose my sanity (yes, it’s 4chan derived, yet still quite useful):

https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Warhammer_40,000_8th_edition
https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Horus_Heresy
https://1d4chan.org/wiki/God-Emperor_of_Mankind
https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Roboute_Guilliman
https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Dark_Imperium

Oathbringer?

More than three years ago I bought “Words of Radiance” and made a blog post about it. No, not a review. I just rambled about the physical object.

Today my copy of “Oathbringer” arrived, so I’m keeping the tradition. This time I’m a week late because Amazon in Europe got much worse. They now have some kind of protectionist deal with the UK publishers so in the whole of Europe they don’t sell anymore American copies of the books until they are one or two months old. It’s ridiculous. So I had to order the Tor/American copy from a different shop, and that means it takes longer to deliver.

Let’s see what we have.

The most obvious change is the price of the book. The first two were $27.99, Oathbringer is now $34.99, so a +$7 increase that I don’t know if it’s due to prices being raised across the board at Tor, or just trying to milk this particular book.

The first two books had a higher quality binding with pages that are folded and sewed together into sections, then glued to the cloth spine. Instead this third volume goes with single pages simply glued to the cloth spine like a normal paperback (or the cheap hardcovers). As far as I know this costs quite a bit less to make.

So we got a +$7 and a reduction in binding quality. I read somewhere the publisher claimed it had to change the binding because the book was “too big”. I’m going to speculate it’s all bullshit. Why? Just remove the soft cover and look at the three books one next to the other. Oathbringer is actually the smallest in size of all the three, and *by far*. This isn’t due to the binding as they suggested: they are simply using a much lighter type of paper.

Oathbringer is about 150 pages longer than the previous book, but by making the paper much lighter they actually managed to have it smaller in size even compared to the first book. So they didn’t have any reason to change the binding as well, it’s just for the money. Sanderson might not be the best writer in the genre, but he’s surely and by far the best when it comes to nourish and grow his fanbase. He has become an “industry” built around himself, and so Tor has won its bet. They heavily invested into Sanderson, and now they are maximizing profits. Sanderson is now their golden boy.

…And he’s also insane. Malazan was insane as well, but the only way you can realistically plan a 10 book series project is the way Erikson did it. A book a year. Why? Because it can only be insane to plan your life around a project that takes more than ten years of continued work and dedication. You are making a promise to stay committed for so long, and that nothing will make you stray from this plan. And even then, how do you guarantee a continuity in the work itself? People change. Taking a deep breath and then diving for ten years might even work, but more?

I think Sanderson’s initial plan with this series was to release a book every couple of years. Book 2 was already late, but the excuse was that he was still busy writing the Wheel of Time. Now I think the plan is to have a book, roughly, every three years. Oathbringer comes more than three and a half years later. With seven more to go we’re looking at a project that will take another 20 years to see its end. And this is the BEST CASE scenario, with Sanderson keeping his output without a single hiccup, and living in a stasis. People might worry that the writer might die before the end, here the risk is that it will be human civilization to come to an abrupt end before this project is over. And of course this 10 book series isn’t even the totality of the project, because Sanderson’s plan stretches WAY beyond that.

I love insanity.

On the other hand, he was smart enough to plan this cycle in two parts. So we’ll have some sort of partial conclusion in book 5. The books themselves continue to be well received and it’s particularly important for two reasons. One is that it’s the middle point of a huge sub-series, so we are at what’s usually the weakest link. But this is what Sanderson’s knows best, being aware and avoiding the common pitfalls. He seems to know exactly what to do.

The wordcounts are crazy as well. The first book was 380k (I’m now using my own counts for all three), and it’s already almost a record for the first volume in a series. Then Words of Radiance was 400k, that represents some kind of mythic boundary that very few writers are able (or allowed) to pass. And now Oathbringer punches through at a rather impressive 450k. And that’s not even the full picture, because of course Sanderson wrote also a novella that is meant to bridge the story between book 2 and 3, and that comes at 40k. So we have Edgedancer + Oathbringer, and 10k short of a half million words.

Or, we are barely at volume 3 in a projected 10 book series, and already at 1 million 270k words. That’s around the same length of all Bakker seven volumes fantasy cycle, or all of Harry Potter, or Stephen King’s Dark Tower.

TL;DR, Oathbringer costs $7 dollar more, is about 50k/150 pages longer, but it also has worse paper and binding. I think between readers and Tor, it’s Tor that got the upper hand. Everything else is pretty much consistent. The pagination is the same. There are 21 illustrations inside, but one is taken from book 1, so 20 overall (and two printed in a way too dark tone), and it’s +1, since the other two volumes had 19 in total. There are also four illustrations for the ‘endpapers’, somewhat like the first book, and the colored map was moved to the back of the soft cover, that I think is kind of pointless. They changed the font of the title, but at least if you remove the soft cover the style remain consistent. I still bet some art director will mess it up before the series is over.

Oh, and they put a typo right in the index. Book Two: Oathbringer

Really? No one could notice that?

Sanderson still plays some weird game with the inner section titles (“New Beginnings Sing” matched with “Defy! Sing Beginnings!”, and “United” matched with “New Unity”), and the cover sucks again as it sucked for book 2. The illustration is slightly nicer but “woman in front of a wall” isn’t exactly my idea for a gorgeous cover.

But… Did you read it?

Nope. When I started “The Way of Kings” the idea was to follow only this series written by Sanderson and ignore all his other output because I’m not such a big fan, so even if I’m a slow reader it was reasonable to think I would read every book before the next came out. And in fact I think I started reading Words of Radiance right away. That was March 2014. I’m… at page 200. I picked it up again a couple of months ago but I couldn’t remember some details, so I decided to restart, and I’m around page 130 or so. Now I have Words of Radiance + Edgedancer + Oathbringer.

I don’t lack the desire to read. I still remember the first book rather well and the second book does what I like already in the prologue. What sparks my interest is this Kabbalistic or esoteric undertone I perceive, where the world Sanderson describes is not the way it appears, but it “conceals” some hidden dimension that overlaps. An hidden layer that looms (and he does this on two fronts, one historical, the other instead pervasive and about the fabric of reality itself). Maybe the depth I perceive is actually inch-deep, but it still carried my interest and in the end it actually fueled the story in a interesting way. I can see certain things coming, but the predictability of this development isn’t a problem. It’s possible that at some point it becomes trivial for me, but Sanderson still strikes a good balance between something accessible and welcoming for a broad public, as well filling it with something meaningful and not entirely shallow and trite.

The books might be insanely long in wordcount, but they are enjoyable. I don’t have problems with the pacing, I didn’t find parts that were slow or pointless. That’s again an aspect why I think Sanderson got so popular. The writing flows well and is lively, characterization is colorful. It’s always about striking that balance between an easy, enjoyable read without falling into the monotony of a commodified product that goes nowhere interesting. There are aspects of the characterization that are too trite and plain, for example with Kaladin, but there’s always something else at play that still carries the page and makes it worthwhile even when it goes through some “scripted”, default motions.

But I still didn’t read it, and I keep getting sidetracked. I recently bought a book pretty much no one heard about. I spotted it on twitter described as “a 600-page novel about matters theological”, so of course I looked into it. The first few lines of the description captivated me, and I already knew I was going to read it:

When Proctor McCullough decides to desert his comfortable London life to build a church on a clifftop, nobody knows what to make of it: McCullough is not religious. Is it a midlife crisis? Has he gone mad? Is he suffering a spiritual breakdown in a secular age, where identity is shaped by wealth and status? Or has he really been chosen by God for a new revelation?

As A God Might Be

It’s an unconventional setup. The man builds a church, but he’s not religious. And there’s this idea of committing to a project that doesn’t have a clear external purpose. But it is not a “mystery”.

I’ve now read about 30 pages and the writing is sublime. The characterization is magical. The dialogue is never declarative and always about some psychological underpinning. There’s a sense of harmony in every line, in every insight into characterization. It’s at the same time very light and profound, and it deals with the characters in a way that really does feel different to me. From just 30 pages I could take countless of quotes to prove the point, very easily, but I guess I’ll keep that to when/if I write specifically about it.

I was also planning to write about other stuff, but I never get to it. I wanted to write some comments about Erikson announcing that the final volume of the current trilogy is being postponed to begin early with the “sequel” trilogy. And I still have notes about stuff in the first few pages of Fall of Light that I wanted to write since the book was released. Maybe at some point.